Talk:Karl Dönitz
I know he was President, not Chancellor, but we did design the German Chancellors category to include all German leaders, heads of state and government. Shall we add him to that category, or redefine the category itself? Turtle Fan 04:43, December 31, 2009 (UTC) :Actually, the Chancellors category is pretty specifically those who were chancellor. It's just that in WW and ItPoME, the Chancellor and the Fuhrer are one and the same, so the category appears more inclusive than it actually is. If you look at the OTL Chancellors category, that's perhaps a little clearer than the ATL category. ::Huh. I thought we had at one point made Chancellors all-inclusive. Turtle Fan 22:34, December 31, 2009 (UTC) :I might once again suggest a broad "German Heads of State Category" for Donitz and Ulbricht, with the Fuhrer and German Monarch Categories as subcats. TR 15:15, December 31, 2009 (UTC) ::Sounds good to me. Turtle Fan 22:34, December 31, 2009 (UTC) Well Hitler was President and Chancellor both, but he left Donitz only the President title, then? Is that right? ::Basically. This is yet another one of those places Hitler fucks everything up. :::The more I study of Hitler, the more I think his greatest crime may have been glaring incompetence. Or at least thrusting everybody into a situation in which they depended on leadership he could not provide. And I'm not even talking about the moral quality of his decisions--just their pragmatic wisdom. Turtle Fan 07:23, January 1, 2010 (UTC) ::::Given that Hitler got by on his charisma, and still did the awful things he did, I suppose we should be grateful he had little else going on. TR 08:03, January 1, 2010 (UTC) :::::Oh, surely. Still it seems a damned shame the entire world was dancing to a tune called by an idiot. That too is a great source of suffering. :::::If he'd had a brain it's also possible, though by no means certain, he wouldn't've been so cruel. An intelligent person could surely realize his paranoid fantasies about Untermenschen weren't worth the paper they were printed on, even given the asinine racial theories which people of his generation internalized, so despicable by modern standards. Turtle Fan 08:08, January 1, 2010 (UTC) And if so, who was his successor as Chancellor? ::Goebbels for about a day. :::Right, but after him. That Krosigk fellow? Turtle Fan 07:23, January 1, 2010 (UTC) ::::Essentially. The title of Chancellor was basically suspended until 1949, and then Adenauer got it in the West. Krosigk was first government minister, or something to that effect. TR 08:03, January 1, 2010 (UTC) :::::And a rose by any other name. . . . Turtle Fan 08:08, January 1, 2010 (UTC) And while my knowledge of German government is admittedly limited, my understanding of the division of powers between the two offices would suggest that, if the offices were divided between two people, something like the signing of a surrender would fall to the Chancellor. Turtle Fan 22:34, December 31, 2009 (UTC) ::Indeed. This fellow, Lutz von Krosigk as a psuedo-successor to Goebbels, authorized the surrender. TR 00:50, January 1, 2010 (UTC)